2023 Women Leaders in Technology: Anita Shankaran

Anita is a senior delivery leader who specializes in enabling our clients to experience exponential business growth by helping them realize the potential of digital solutions. She has done this numerous times over her twenty-year career by focusing on bringing a transformation mindset, emphatic leadership, and value creation for clients and their end customers. Anita puts end customers, clients, and teams at the center of all that she does, and she approaches her engagements with the spirit of partnership, collaboration, outcome-focus and fun. Anita's experience across industries and solutions is comprehensive, having partnered with clients primarily across Retail in the last several years, but also in Financial Services, Telecom and Health care as well. Anita is well-known as an active contributor to the PS Retail team, Product Capability, the Toronto office community and as a mentor in the Women's Leadership Network at Publicis Sapient. Anita is the mother of 2 teenage boys and in her spare time is passionate about being active in nature, travel, and her love of classical Indian arts.

What has been the biggest factor in your success so far?

My ability to connect with people has played a key role in my success with clients, teams and colleagues thus far. When working with clients, I prioritize understanding their business context and goals so I can help to identify key opportunities and chart a course for change. I am committed to building strong and lasting partnerships both with individual client stakeholders and between organizations.

When working with large teams, I ensure that they feel connected to the client's vision and purpose so they understand the 'why' and can see their place in the solutions we are creating. The strongest signal that my teams feel this connection is that they are creating their OWN MOMENTUM, e.g., self-organizing to find efficiencies and deliver better, sharing learnings and coming together in team events.

With individual team members, I focus on recognition, happiness and personal growth drivers in my coaching and servant leadership. I work hard to cultivate culture in my teams (even across continents!) where members are engaged, feel seen, and are enabled to step out of their comfort zone.

My interest in people is innate; however, I have also actively cultivated skills of objectivity, empathy, active listening and having hard conversations — this has been instrumental to success as my work and teams have scaled over time. Along the way, I've become passionate about integrating diverse perspectives, developing better insights and outcomes through collaboration, building trust and advocacy, and have had SO MUCH MORE FUN through meaningful, lasting connections.

What do you enjoy most about your career in the consulting industry?

What I enjoy most about consulting is tackling a variety of complex problems while creating memorable experiences with clients and teams as a collective. My work as the NA account lead for a large US grocery retailer is one example of this.

Our marketing client needed to resolve huge gaps in operational efficiency and drive substantial business results from marketing campaigns. Our team built a state-of-the-art marketing platform which resulted in significant operational improvements: reduced time to curate and deploy a campaign from 15 days to one day and reduced latency to contact customers who abandoned their cart from three days to two hours. We also exceeded target KPIs across all campaigns.

These results were huge wins for our client, strengthening the partnership and opening doors to more strategic work. What I remember most however, are dozens of ways we came together as one team to ensure everyone understood the business problem we were solving and how we would succeed. My team was over 100 people globally, with over a dozen key client stakeholders. We brought both teams together continuously to discuss Vision and Plans, ran Retrospectives and Lunch and Learns, socialized in virtual Coffee Conversations, Happy Hours and more.

Building a one-team mentality bolstered our collective purpose and built relationships, which made navigating the hard work easier and the moments of celebration and recognition more meaningful. The combination of delivering impactful work, applying learnings with new projects and teams, and building partnerships is what I love about my job.

What is your proudest achievement to date?

Creating true digital business transformation that creates game changing and lasting business results for clients and their customers is the work I have been proudest to be a part of.

As the Lead on an engagement with one of the world's largest retailers, I led the team that orchestrated several innovations and 'firsts' in the Canadian retail market. Like many retailers, my client faced a complex set of challenges e.g., a breakneck rate of change in technology, changing consumer demands, challenging market conditions, competitive disruption, and the balance of data driven product evolution at speed.

Over five years, we worked closely with this client designing, developing, incubating, and realizing online Grocery Home Shopping, Marketplace, and the Next Generation store experiences. These omni channel, customer centered experiences changed the landscape of Canadian retail at the time and enabled the client to not only strengthen its position as an industry leader, but also to deepen its relationship with consumers and drive measurably greater loyalty and connection to the brand. Through our partnership and these experience innovations, our client's e-commerce revenue grew from $30M to $1B. The transformative evolution of their revenue and rapid expansion and maturity of service offerings during our partnership ESTABLISHED our clients' Canadian e-commerce business within the global ecosystem of this retailer.

This was a foundational engagement in my journey executing transformation work, and I continually seek out opportunities to apply learnings to new client work and with my teams to support our collective learning and growth.

What's the best advice you've ever been given?

I have a career journey that I am extremely proud of, however, I have also struggled with imposter syndrome as I moved into more senior and male-dominated circles where I was often the only woman in the room either in real life or virtually. In those moments I, like many other women, questioned my presence at the table. The most impactful advice I've received was to document my accomplishments; to lay out the business and operational impacts I have created for my clients, and the impacts I've created for teams and individuals in the Retail, Product, and Toronto communities I am a part of. It is important and empowering for women to ask themselves "What does the evidence tell you?" and to make a conscious choice to inspect and BELIEVE the positive evidence so that we see ourselves the way our peers, supervisees, clients and leadership see us. In my area of Retail in particular, where women have a significant share of the buying power, diversity of thought is critical to meet the evolving demands of the business.

Being objective about yourself takes vigilance, so as part of my passion to pay it forward, I actively encourage women I work with and mentor, not only to build the skills and experience needed to establish their unique value proposition, but to also intentionally cultivate confidence and self-advocacy by taking advantage of mentorship and coaching programs (e.g. Women's Leadership Network at Publicis Sapient, 'I am Remarkable' training) and building a trusted network.

What does this recognition mean to you?

Winning this award gives me an enormous sense of pride and purpose. Beyond being recognized within my organization, it would be a recognition of my impact and potential on a platform that celebrates the impacts of my women peers in technology.

I view this award as an opportunity to inspire others. Recognition is an enabler as it motivates and energizes people to do more, and the idea of inspiring and galvanizing women on my teams, women that I supervise, and my peers to reach for the same industry recognitions, is incredibly exciting. It is a universal truth that representation matters. As I have 'grown up' as a woman in technology, I have realized that that there is no substitution for the impact of seeing yourself represented in the leadership of an organization. I was recently promoted to the role of Senior Director at Publicis Sapient, and as I reflect on the journey of applying and substantiating my case for promotion, I realize that it began with me seeing other women who I related to professionally, being recognized at very senior levels. I absolutely have my own impact story to tell and stand behind, but I believe that reaching for more recognition was influenced by seeing others like me do the same. I am excited and honored at the prospect of continuing to model the way with this platform and explore every way to pay it forward and contribute back to the community of women leaders in technology.